QandO

February 09, 2004

If you read one interview this year....
Posted by Jon Henke

Throughout the Iraq debate, Kenneth Pollack has struck me as an intellectually honest fellow, so this interview in The Atlantic is worth a glance...

For this article, I went back over the evidence that we had throughout the 1980s and 1990s and compared it with the information that is starting to trickle out of Iraq—such as what has been learned in the debriefings of Iraq scientists, what David Kay, of the Iraqi Survey Group, and his team have found, and other pieces of information that have surfaced.

Prior to 1996, it looks like Saddam was trying to hold on to the maximum amount of his programs that he could. He was certainly trying to maintain a major research-and-development capability, and also a production capability that would allow him to reconstitute his WMD arsenal at any time, should he have chosen to do so. In this 1995-1996 time frame, it seems that Saddam realized that this effort was becoming counterproductive. More and more of it was being discovered by the United Nations. Hussein Kamel, his son-in-law and the head of the WMD programs, defected to the West, which caused the Iraqis to turn over huge amounts of documents.

As a result of that whole fiasco, the UNSCOM inspectors learned a tremendous amount about the Iraqi efforts to conceal the WMD programs. There were a number of other important discoveries during that time. All of this made it almost impossible to get the sanctions lifted, which was, of course, Saddam's primary goal.

So, it seems to have been the case that probably in 1996, Saddam made an important decision. He shifted from trying to maintain the maximum possible WMD programs to simply trying to maintain the minimum necessary to, at some point in the future, reconstitute them after the sanctions were lifted.

Pollack, commenting on the problems of limited HUMINT data....

The fact that we didn't have very good information this time was not an obvious signal that he was doing something different and had chosen to disband many of the programs. It seemed simply to be a sign that he had gotten even better at hiding them from us.

Of course, it is important to remember that what we have found in Iraq does indicate that the Iraqis were retaining programs. It is not the case the Iraqis dismantled everything—it's just that they dismantled most. What they kept was only a residual element that would enable them to reconstitute at some point in the future.

The weapons were clearly much less threatening than the U.S. intelligence believed them to be, but it's not as if they didn't have any WMD programs at all.

My evidence came straight from the intelligence community. As an analyst at the CIA and as a member of the NSC when Hussein Kamel defected, everything I saw indicated that the Iraqis still had these programs. When I went back to the NSC in the late 1990s, I was simply relying on the intelligence community to tell me what the right answer was. I did not simply accept their judgment uncritically, however. I did press them, and I asked them why they thought what they thought. They seemed to have reasonable answers and sources out there.

I pressed them on why they believed their sources, and they responded with what seemed like a reasonable set of suppositions. I was certainly not alone in this—this was a consensus among the U.S. government, it was a consensus among the UN inspectors, it was a consensus of American experts outside the U.S. government. In fact, it was a consensus in the entire international community.

It's important to remember that any intelligence service or country with the ability to monitor Iraq and its weapons programs—Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Israel—was a hundred percent certain that Saddam had these programs. There may have been some debate over just how aggressive they were or how far along they were.

The Germans were the most alarmist of all on the subject of a nuclear weapon. They thought the Iraqis might have one in as little as two or three years. Our own intelligence community tended to be a little more conservative; they thought it was more like four to six years away—or five to seven. But no one doubted that Saddam had these weapons.

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